Will Ireland Become The World’s Richest Country?

13 comments
  1. On paper maybe, but it feels like we’re some guy paid to live in an empty mansion so no one can claim squatter’s rights, rather than someone who is actually wealthy.

  2. How are we this rich and I don’t know if the bus is even gonna show up to take me away from the house I’ll never own, to the hospital to wait 16 hours for triage?

  3. Where is the benefit to the ordinary worker in all this wealth? Just makes us look more disgraceful.

  4. So there’s this recurring problem with the word “rich”.

    Most people use it to refer to wealth.

    But occasionally people use it to refer to income per capita. Which is not what most people understand by wealth.

    If I’ve got €1 in the bank, and an income of €60k;

    and my mate Farah has got €1,000,000 in investments & banks, and an income of €30k;

    then I’ve got double the income of Farah, but Farah is clearly richer than me.

    And if Farah’s income is real, but €20k of my income is accounting-trickery and isn’t real, then my income is still higher than Farah’s, but it’s not really double. Similarly, for Ireland, our GDP per capita is much more inflated than for most other countries, by accounting tricks of multinationals.

    So, Ireland has a fictitious high income per capita, and low material wealth.

    It also also relatively low capital per person in several non-financial meanings of the word capital. For example, we have extremely low natural capital: our biodiversity is heavily degraded, our countryside largely industrialised by the dairy industry. And we have some low institutional capital: our institutions are relatively poor-performing compared to other countries in the western half of the EU.

    On the other hand, we have very high educational capital (well-educated population) and high social capital (high social cohesiveness).

  5. All this Ireland is rich crap can Fuck off. We can’t afford decent transport. Decent housing. Decent amenities and parks. public toilets.

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